Handed out candy to trick-or-treaters

Handing out candy to trick-or-treaters was great fun. My costume was to be a bouquet of flowers. Green t-shirt with a few flowers taped on with clear duct tape.

Chili's for lunch and dinner

Went out to lunch at Chili's with the Sales team today. We won favorite overall Halloween decorated cubicle in the Unicon Halloween festivities for Jason Lacy's efforts implementing a Deal or No Deal theme and thereby gained a modest gift certificate to Chili's. It was tasty -- I had the chipotle bleu cheese burger. But I then noticed on the menu both a honey barbecue sirloin and a molten chocolate cake dessert.

I have a weakness for molten chocolate deserts.

So I went back for dinner, on my own, which is slightly less sinful for having used the time to prepare for the Science of Software talk I'm to give in a week (I'm feeling totally unprepared). Honey barb sirloin was delicious. Molten chocolate desert was kind of disappointing. My favorite molten cakes are still those I enjoyed at Oolong's Tea Bar in New Haven, CT -- I'm very disappointed to see the place has closed.

Incidentally, I've decided I have a real problem with the portrayal of gender roles in Deal or No Deal, having perused their website a bit. Never seen the show.

allergies

I'd been feeling pretty miserable for the last week and was convinced I had some kind of horrible infection going on. Nose hurt, sinuses hurt, could have sworn I was feverish, felt miserable. Figured it was amphliblius or something similarly dire.

Saw the doctor today. He tells me it's just allergies. No massive antibiotics for me. Got back on Claritin and using Benadryl for pointed relief at bedtime.

As long as I was at the doctor, got my flu shot for the season, which I particularly justify by the fact that I'll be hanging out with my grandparents at Christmas. But I'm flying around enough these days that it seems quite sensible to take this effort not to contribute to spreading the flu around.

Update from later: anti-allergy meds are working great! I feel human again!

Unicon and uPortal in the news

Pretty cool to see Unicon and uPortal positively featured in a CNNMoney.com news item. Lest anyone wonder whether the free and open source uPortal portal platform can scale: one million users, baby.

Read an article about an Internet Relationship

I found this article pretty disturbing.

It's the sort of thing that reminds that "intentional infliction of emotional distress" isn't always hogwash.

Dear Kohls, your website is unusable

A note I sent today to the kind folks who run kohls.com

Dear Kohls,

I write to express significant displeasure with your website.

I first visited your website in order to register my Kohls credit account in order to pay it online.

I navigated to http://www.kohls.com

And at the upper right there's a My Kohls Charge link with this URL: "javascript:launchCorporate('http://credit.kohls.com')"

When I click it, I am directed to "https://credit.kohls.com/psp/zcprod02/?cmd=login&errorCode=105&languageCd=ENG"

Which is an error message, quoted here:

[



My Kohl's Charge





We have recently improved our site and have a new address.

Please click here to go to Kohls.com, select the My Kohl's Charge option at
the top of the page, and update your Favorites link to My Kohl's Charge
with the new address.

If you continue to have difficulties, please contact us at 1-800-470-0554.

Please note that payments can be made in ANY store at ANY register, over
the phone by check, or the payment can be mailed to our payment center at:

Kohl's Payment Center
P.O. Box 2983
Milwaukee, WI 53201-2983

]

The "Please click here" hyperlink takes me to "http://www.kohls.com/", and when I use the link to My Kohl's Charge at the top of the screen as directed, I again visit this error message: infinite loop.

So then I go to the Customer Service portion of your website in order to contact you. Rather than clearly articulating an email address at which you may be reached, there's some kind of web form for entering my first and last name and email address, and then selecting a topic from a pull down, and clicking "Go". That doesn't work either: when I do that, it clears the filled out form fields but doesn't give me an opportunity to compose a message.

Overall, I'd say you haven't "recently improved your site" enough. Please correct these significant usability problems with your web presence. A website that doesn't work frustrates customers, erodes consumer confidence, and erodes the association of the Kohl's brand with quality.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Petro

Jane Austen Book Club

I saw Jane Austen Book Club today in Gilbert.

PodCampAZ volunteer coordination meeting

Went to the PodCamp AZ volunteer coordination meeting today. In retrospect I should have brought a laptop. This would require owning a laptop with usable wireless access, which isn't quite presently the case, but I have high hopes for the newly-Unicon-issued work laptop.

I'm helping with set-up crew on Saturday, as well as manning the registration desk in between the sessions in which I have interest. Must remember to bring lunch. It will be fun to be unskilled labor for a day.

Why do I keep doing this to myself?

That really hurt.

Blood type A Positive

Received in mail my United Blood Services donor card today. Apparently I am blood type A Positive. Neat.

2 miles

Ran 2 miles with Doug after work.

Phone call

A phone call from a friend just made my day.

Honesty

Honesty and Honest Tea with a local friend. Stuffed crust pizza from Pizza Hut and coupon clipping fun to go with.

Jersey Boys

I saw Jersey Boys this evening at ASU Gammage. It was ok.

On Apologizing without really meaning it

Southwest Airlines' repeated harassment of its passengers about clothing that is not in fact lewd, obscene, or patently offensive suggests that their apologies to the harassed customers may not in fact be sincere. If one apologizes and means it, one does not turn around and commit the same offense immediately.

Southwest can make light of it, but it's not really funny. I wish they would focus on things that matter, like not running airliners off the runway and into motor vehicle traffic so that they crush little boys, and less on things that don't matter, like stupid t-shirts.

A Southwest Boeing 737 landed on a snowy Dec. 8 and rolled off the end of a slippery runway, crashing through two fences and striking vehicles outside the airport on Central Avenue at 55th Street.

Joshua Woods, 6, of Leroy, Ind., a passenger in one of the vehicles, was crushed to death.

(As reported in the Chicago Tribune).

Justice is not achieved through trickery

I am gravely disappointed that Senator Craig has been unsuccessful in having his guilty plea withdrawn and receiving a fair and speedy trial before a jury of his peers.

Yes, Senator Craig, stupidly, pled guilty. A guilty plea signifies an admission of culpability, an agreement of the accused and the prosecutor and the court that a guilty verdict is appropriate.

It is clear that Senator Craig no longer agrees. It is also if not clear at least apparently strongly possible that he entered that guilty plea on the basis of assurances a police officer had no cause to be making, assurances made in bad faith. Senator Craig was misled. Shame on him for being a person in such a position of power and yet so naive as to believe a police officer. Shame on the system for misleading him.

Confidence in the criminal justice system in part stems from belief that those convicted of a crime are guilty of that crime. We achieve that confidence through an expensive and rigorous criminal justice process involving a trial before a jury of the accused's peers wherein the Government proves that the accused committed the crime. We forgo this expense when the accused agrees to guilt, often in exchange for lesser consequences. That coercion is extremely philosophically and practically problematic, but the coercion of the plea bargaining system is not the topic of this post.

In this case there is some doubt about what really happened with Senator Craig, about whether there has been some misunderstanding. Failure to overturn the guilty plea and require a trial avoids an opportunity that it be proven beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of citizens that a crime was committed here. That standard is appropriate an necessary in a situation where a vote in the most powerful lawmaking body in the world is on the line.

Trickery and something short of the full judicial process swings a senator from power and influence to criminality. We the people ought to be uncomfortable with that. I believe Senator Craig is owed a trial here, but even short of that, I believe the people, you and I, are owed that trial. Here is a situation where a guilty plea ought not to have been accepted in the first place.

"Mr. Craig, the court apologizes, but it finds that it is contrary to the interests of justice to accept your plea. The people are owed proof beyond a reasonable doubt where a senator is effectively removed from office. The court regrets any embarrassment a trial may cause you, but recognizes that really, you're going to face embarrassment and ridicule regardless, so that may at least be purposeful in giving the public assurance that justice is indeed being served. Your guilty plea cannot be accepted. Please enter a plea of not guilty."

Simple Personal File Backup

I've been trying out Mozy for file backup on my personal computer. So far I've been very impressed. I wish they had an Ubuntu client, in addition to the Mac OS X and Windows support.

Beware of swimming in nature

PHOENIX --
It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.